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Have you finished yours yet? A friend of mine started hers nearly a year ago, while one of my colleagues began last week and managed to do it all in a day. And with only a week to go, many of you will be rushing around desperate to finish yours in time.

What am I talking about? Your requirement as a registered social landlord to publish your policies and procedures in relation to antisocial behaviour, of course – what did you think? As you will doubtless know, this has to be completed by 30 December.

Now, usually I have little interest in closely following the development of protocols in other organisations, but this time both the ODPM and the Housing Corporation clearly state that mediation must be considered as an option for tackling bad behaviour.

And sure enough, we have recently begun to get enquiries from registered social landlords that had previously never used us. It would have been nice to hear from them earlier but, as with Christmas shopping, there seems to be a mad rush at the last minute. So I thought a simple guide might be useful to help you sift through all the offers and pick the right type of mediation for you.

Ideally, you should approach your local mediation service and ask about the costs and mechanisms involved in referring cases. In North Staffordshire, we charge about £400 on a case-by-case basis, and will reduce this if we receive grant funding in advance (as this can be used more readily to increase the overall capacity and efficiency of our organisation).

You may want to start by using mediation on a case-by-case basis for a few months so you can assess the effectiveness of the service and, therefore, the level of grant funding that might need to be found for future years.

One word of warning, though: please don’t swamp your local service with lots of cases all in one go. And don’t just dump all the really thorny cases on it, making mediation a last resort. I know of one RSL that, for the past five years, has said it doesn’t have any suitable cases. Now, it has suddenly sent three cases, all of which have been going on for at least six years.

I dare say the clients involved will all be thoroughly entrenched and mediation may struggle to help them find a solution.

You might be in a position where you have no local service. Mediation, as a profession, may be developing rapidly but it is still somewhat patchy across the country. Or you may not have enough stock to warrant an independent service.

This was certainly the case in North Staffordshire a few years ago. So a funding partnership was formed and, six years ago, I was appointed to set up Mediation North Staffordshire. If that’s not a viable option for you, you could go for an in-house service – training key members of staff within your organisation to take on the mediation role. But you must ensure your mediators can act with a fair degree of independence, otherwise your tenants will never trust them.

Whatever you decide to do, ensure that you use mediation appropriately. Despite the evangelical way some of my colleagues promote the service, it is no panacea.

Nor is it a sandal-wearing, hippy-type intervention only applicable to the softer side of antisocial behaviour. Mediation has an 80% success rate and, compared with the costs of legal action, is a value-for-money option.

Used properly, it is a real solution to potentially damaging problems.